History
I run MATE, but to paraphrase a restaurant - "I want Debian MyWay" ;)
It was suggested that I wanted what KDE calls "activities".
It looked promising. I installed it. It suffers from featuritis.

fvwm-crystal was also suggested. When installed it was in some sense
"cleaner" but still too busy. Launched fvwm which had been installed
by the fvwm-crystal package.

The problem

It had "inherited" configuration items from fvwm-crystal. The web
pages I had read spoke of a default 1st run display. I could not
figure out how to get that to appear.

Having adequate space available I used netinst to do a base command
line only install to a new partition. It was followed by doing
"apt-get install fvwm".

I rebooted expecting a minimal fvwm display. I got a command line.

To clarify I got a console command line (Whole screen is one window with
no graphical ornaments !)

I found that though a "/home/richard/.fvwm" directory had been
created, it was empty. I couldn't find copies of what files should
have been there on initial first run. Only instructions/examples for
adding this or that doodad.

It was suggested that

So to get you kick-started,
just create a file named "config" in your /home/richard/.fvwm
consisting of this one line:
Read /usr/share/fvwm/default-config/config